You Too?

"Their name is Giltenn," Jude said, holding the arm up so that Ezra could get a better look at it. "I've gotten used to having them around, and they're pretty quiet most of the time? They can talk to me at any time, but generally it's more like... having someone in the room with you, but not feeling like you need to talk? They're always there, but they're not super chatty or anything."

As he spoke about Giltenn he could feel them, almost like someone was leaning over his mental shoulder to tell what was being talked about. But the feeling didn't linger for long, and Giltenn withdrew to their usual level of watching but not caring.

Well, Giltenn being gone long didn't last long. Right around the time that Ezra started undoing their wrappings, revealing the mess of markings and runes, Giltenn leaned forward again, and Jude could feel in a way that defied any sort of explanation that they were interested.

Incorrect, Giltenn thought to the entire explanation.

"Hold on," Jude muttered verbally, his eyes flicking around as if talking to someone. "Are you sure about that? About... all that."

Giltenn made a mental huff.

The markings are not to control a puppet. They are seals.

Wrathful. They seemed... well, Jude was having a hard time getting a read on how genuine they were, and he felt the need to clarify.

"Well, Giltenn's pretty nice. They're not particularly wrathful, and they can't do anything in the real world. Whatever they do, they have to do through me, and we have a pretty good system." A good system of Jude feeding Giltenn information in exchange for Giltenn's help, and... well, lack of interference.

Giltenn could puppet Jude around, but they didn't. The moment they did, Rory would burn Giltenn out of Jude without a second thought, and Giltenn knew it.

Jude couldn't help but squint at the they couldn't have made a mistake. He didn't think it was a mistake. One didn't accidentally seal someone. Ezra was definitely sealed--Giltenn was feeding him plenty of information about that--but it wasn't by accident.

That was a great big hmmmm, but one Jude was content to keep under his hat for the moment. Nothing good would come of insisting otherwise.

"Back in my world, there's beings called the Gultha. They're... impossibly powerful incarnations of entire concepts, like destruction or entropy or something like that. They have physical anchors, which allow them to manifest, and I found Giltenn's in... a kind of pressing situation. Someone was about to steal them, and they picked me to host them so they could get away. It worked out fairly well."

He reached up, trailing a line along his forearm just below the elbow, a point where the decoration on his hand stopped and became simple, unmarked silver metal.

"They used to be a gauntlet, up to about there."

"That's right," Jude said, actually sort of impressed that Ezra had managed to follow along. It was all kind of... well, confusing. There were a ton of factors. His world. Giltenn. His life. His father. Breakneck. And like a dozen other people and things that all had to snap together. It was hard to explain one without explaining the other.

"It wasn't helping them that made me nearly die. That was... other stuff. I'd already had Giltenn for a while like that. They used to do this thing where they'd hide themselves from sight, so it looked like it was just my arm, and only I could feel it. Afterwards they were stretched too thin, so they couldn't manage that."

He reached up with his flesh-and-bone hand, dragging a thumb across some of the metal in his jaw.

"It goes down farther, too. This is just what's visible. I figure it would be scar tissue if it wasn't metal."

He paused to consider, glancing over Ezra once more.

"You followed along pretty well. I knew it wasn't exactly the... clearest explanation."

There was definitely something a little bit off about the way Ezra smiled. Like they were trying slightly too hard, or trying slightly no hard enough. There was no way for Jude to tell, but he did his best to try and not be bothered by the slightly deranged looking smile being pointed in his direction. It sort of reminded him of how Blade might smile, or Finch - something that wasn't at all used to smiling but was trying to make an effort anyway to be friendly.

"You're definitely straight forward," Jude admitted. "But not really pushy so far. People on the island tend to have a good tolerance for being up front about things. In the narrow reality, people would think it was rude if you... I don't know, asked someone what species they were or what powers they had. But here those are normal topics of conversation. There's so many people from so many backgrounds that it doesn't feel like you can assume anything, so everyone just gets taught to ask instead."

Like him. IT had taken a bit for him to get over it and start just asking, but once he had things had felt so much better.

Ezra was... well, sweet. They felt significantly younger than Jude, but he knew it wasn't really age... probably. Just inexperience. Jude was one of the better people to ask, because while he wasn't exactly great at breaking down simple concepts or things like that, he had a pretty high tolerance for explaining things that many others might have dismissed out of hand.

"No, that would be a normal enough conversation," he said. "I read a lot. Most of my time was taken up with... uh, work - but I don't really do that anymore since I got to Manta Carlos. So it's been reading and catching up so I can be ready for class. I have... maybe ninety or so years of history to catch up on, to make sure I have it all in mind."

Earlier history was mostly the same, but around the time that supernatural abilities started to show up in his world, things had begun to split.

He'd been extremely surprised to learn there was a second world war, for one thing. He'd assumed one was enough for everyone.

"What about you? Normally it's pretty standard to kind of do... ah, back and forth. Like, you ask me something, so I ask you something."

Maybe it was a bit patronizing to say it, but he figured Ezra might appreciate it.